M'Pessoba Ferme

I returned to Bamako yesterday from a five-day visit to the site where I will spend the next two years of my service, M'Pessoba Ferme, or Feremuna. It was an interesting five days, full of meetings, exploration, and a bit of welcome relaxation.

My journey began last Wednesday, when I set off from Tubaniso with my homologue (the person in my community who will help me figure out projects to work on and connect to people in the community), Soulemane Dao, at 5:30 in the morning. The day before, Dao had arrived to participate in the "homologue workshop" where everyone's homologues came to learn about the mission of the Peace Corps and what would be expected of them as homologues. This was business as usual for Dao, who has been acting as a homologue for the past five years. There were two volunteers in my village before me, Jenn (Jeneba) and Michelle (Aissita), and he had also had the opportunity to work with volunteers in another village before this. Luckily, he speaks very good French, so when my broken Bambara isn't good enough (frequently), he can clarify in French.

The journey on Wednesday to Feremuna was fairly uneventful. I boarded a bus with Dao and another volunteer, Amanda Jackson, and her homologue, which took us straight to M'Pessoba (where Amanda is stationed) and then to Feremuna, 5-6 km down the road. Feremuna is the home of the Centre d'Apprentissage Agricole, a three-year agricultural school where Dao works as a veteranarain and a professor. The school, and a large part of the village, is located along a wide dirt road lined with mangoe trees that is immediately off the main paved road from M'Pessoba. My house is at the end of this road, a three-room house with a small yard and a private nyegan.

When we arrived, there was a group of women from the women's cooperative waiting to greet me. Unfortunately, I didn't spend as much time talking with them as I would have liked to in retrospect, but we exchanged greetings and names and talked for a few minutes. My host mother, Djelika, and her husband Drissa were also there, and served lunch to Dao and myself. I spent the afternoon hanging around with my host mother for a while asking questions about the women's cooperative, and then Dao arrived to take me around the village and greet many of the profesors and meet the director of the school (who is technically my supervisor, though I'm not sure how much involvement he'll have in my work).

Thursday, I found myself largely without things to do. I spent part of the morning studying Bambara and thinking of some questions to ask the women in the village about the garden (which Dao had showed me the day before). In the afternoon, I decided to go for a walk alone and see what there was to see, maybe check out the garden by myself again. As I walked towards the garden, I met a number of village inhabitants and was invited to chat for a while. Everyone was friendly, and patient with my elementary Bambara skills. When I arrived in the garden, I ran into Kassoum, Dao's oldest son, who went around the garden with me and told me the names of all the crops being grown. The garden looked pretty well established.

I'm still trying to figure out precisely what my role will be in the community. The previous volunteers helped out in the garden, helped the women's cooperative with cloth dying and soap making, and also helped out at the local maternity and a maternity in a neighboring town weighing children and giving vaccinations (though not the actual needle sticking part). There seems to be an endless number of things I could get involved with.

The next couple of days I spent meeting up with local volunteers Merv and Greg and with Amanda as well. On Saturday we took a trip to Koutiala, a city about 45 minutes-1 hour down the road that has about 100,000 inhabitants. I have a feeling I'll be going down there once every two weeks or so; we have a house rented out in a coupound downtown that we can spend the night in and there is a rather large market and a restaurant or two. We hung out Saturday night and returned to the M'Pessoba area around 1 pm the next day.

Now I'm back at Tubaniso, anticipating going back to Sinsina on Thursday. Most recent news: got one of the other volunteers to cut my hair for me and it is now back to the length it was when I was in Paris, a few inches above my shoulders. It feels good- lighter, and I'm sure it will be much easier to take care of. That's it for now, folks.